Gerard Byrne

The Irish artist Gerard Byrne applies innovative methods to distinctive subject matter. London is hosting a major survey “Gerard Byrne: A state of neutral pleasure,” covering the period 2003–12 at the Whitechapel Gallery, complemented by new work, “Present Continuous Past,” at the Lisson Gallery, London, England.

Byrne’s typical method might be characterized as relocating the documented past into a theatrical present. Those aspects are relatively separate in the Whitechapel’s two photographic series. Theatrical photographs of country roads use a stage lighting set-up to illuminate putative sites at which Vladimir and Estragon might have waited for Godot. Temporal relocation is foregrounded in the monochrome images of news kiosks, retitled for each fresh showing along the lines “Three months and twenty days ago”—counting back from the date of their display to emphasize how we understand the past through the lens of our particular present. But it’s the so-called “magazine works” that have brought Byrne to such attention as inclusion in the Venice Biennale in 2007 and 2011 and documenta, 2012. These theatricize the past in a more complex and integrated way; interviews published 30 and more years ago are appropriated to form the already rather artificial texts for filmed plays that move the action to the present. In so doing, they apply a range of devices that have been widely identified as Brechtian—off-kilter accents, anachronistic appearances, the foregrounding of present day technology—to ensure that we don’t become immersed in the past on its own terms.

Thus, the assumptions of the past are exposed to the glare of our hindsight; as the dialogues often look forward to the past future that is our present, the limitations of prediction become evident. That hints in turn at how wrong we are likely to be about what will happen to us—and also how likely it is that a future viewer would find our attitudes far from correct.

The primary subject matter of Byrne’s dialogues has been the performance of male identity in areas of clichéd masculine interest: science fiction, cars, art as historically practised and sex. The Whitechapel featured Why it’s time for Imperial, again (1998–2002) from a National Geographic advertorial about the merits of a car; Homme à femmes (Michel Debrane), the actor’s version of a 1977 interview with Jean-Paul Sartre about his relations with women; New Sexual Lifestyles, 2005, restaging a 1973 conversation for Playboy that involved prominent figures of the sexual revolution; 1984 and Beyond, 2005–07, in which science fiction writers discuss the future; and two multi-screen projections new to Britain: A thing is a hole in a thing it is not, 2010, deals with minimalist art and artists and A man and a woman make love, 2012, repurposes an all-male surrealist round table on sexual tastes from 1928.

Byrne might be said in all these to deconstruct patriarchal attitudes by, as he puts it in an interview for the catalogue with the exhibition’s curator Kristy Ogg, re-enacting “historical referents in ways that make them palpably vulnerable.” In the surrealist discussion, for example, installed across five slab-like, tilted screens, eight participants provoke each other into providing competitively explicit views on the sexual drives that formed such a major part of their world view. What’s the best age for a woman? Would they want sex in church? (Queneau: “I’ll never set foot in a church and wouldn’t do so for that”) Or with a nun? Though set up as a scientific investigation, it’s thoroughly unmethodical, subjective and amusingly inappropriate.

The Brechtian effects in A man and a woman make love include the viewer having to track the footage across intermittent screens, making it hard not to miss some bits, the staging itself being in front of an audience and the inclusion of footage of the editing suite in which the questions and responses are put together. Such devices limit our empathy for the characters, and we find ourselves concentrating on the issues raised rather than the people raising them. “The aim of the alienation effect,” according to Brecht himself, is “to make the spectator adopt an attitude of enquiry and criticism.”

Why choose masculinity as a topic? For Bryne’s work to gain full traction, it needs to operate in areas in which not only have attitudes changed, but the audience can critically engage with the before and after states—and that suits. Or, to put it the other way around: if Byrne set out to explore the history of patriarchy, he’s found a forcefully subtle means of doing so.

The work at the Lisson Gallery pulls back from those concerns and uses similar methods to zoom in on different specifics and reframe our view of them. The ongoing project “Images or shadows of divine things” presents recent black and white photographs of archetypal American scenes as if they were showing an earlier time, and that within a theological viewpoint are referred to by the title. Other series of photos use the backs of paintings and photographic filters as objects with art historical narratives. A stage prop acts as a thematically provisional sculpture. The three screen video Subject departs from a place (University of Leeds) rather than a text, though it led Byrne to find a script that deals with class and social change in the context of speculating on what the architect hoped for from his building’s future. These new works feel gentler, as if probing for a direction to develop more intensely towards the cumulative bite of the Whitechapel show. I look forward to seeing how that happens. ❚

“Gerard Byrne: A state of neutral pleasure” was exhibited at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, England, from January 17 to March 18, 2013. “Present Continuous Past” was exhibited at the Lisson Gallery, London, England, from January 30 to March 9, 2013.

Paul Carey-Kent is a freelance art critic based in Southampton, England, whose writings can be found at .